Time for hardball

With the Prime Minister at least nominally back in the driving seat a number of matters that had been on hold while he was indisposed have come to the fore. A wide-ranging discussion took place at the PM Raiwind residence on Tuesday July 12 and the government may at last be stirring its bones. Among the matters discussed were ‘what do we do about Imran Khan?’ who has been rattling pots in the political kitchen ever since the breakdown of negotiations about the framing of the Terms of Reference (ToR’s) relative to the Panama Papers leak.

Notwithstanding the denial that the meeting ever took place at all by some quarters, it is high time for the PML-N to, in the vernacular — get its’ act together. The next election is on the not too far distant horizon and although the punditry are already predicting a PML-N win not everybody is going to vote for them and they are going to have a hard job selling the ‘achievements’ of the last three years. The main opposition parties are well aware of this and have been chipping away for weeks, with the enervating spectre of yet another protracted and tedious dharna being laid on if the Pakistan-Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) does not get its way.

The PM is said to be angry at the ‘malicious propaganda’ unleashed against him by a range of parties, and he was advised to narrow his fire down to countering the PTI rather than take a scattergun approach. The reality is that the PTI is nowadays the only other party able to land telling body blows on the PML-N, and the Kitchen Cabinet are advising a ‘single tough strategy’ to counter the PTI threat. That would represent a marked change of direction for the PML-N which has tended towards managing relations with other parties very much on the basis of gentlemen’s agreements. But the Panama Papers are a game changer. They are not going away, they are concrete facts not nebulous gossip, and they raise uncomfortable questions for how the PM has managed his family finances. Time to play hardball Mr PM. Your move.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14^th, 2016.

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